Each year at CES the tech press goes abuzz with futuristic flexible displays, but the hype consequentially dies down as concepts fail to materialize in consumer products. Even Steve Jobs dismissed foldable display at the D8 conference, commenting on them as being “many, many years into the future”. But Samsung has been toying with flexible displays for some time and now they are about to mainstream the technology with consumer mobile products sporting bendable displays.

According toPCWorld, the South Korean conglomerate is “aiming to launch mobile phones with flexible displays next year”. The official confirmation came during a third-quarter earnings conference call with analyst, with spokesman Robert Yi saying:

The flexible display, we are looking to introduce sometime in 2012, hopefully the earlier part. The application probably will start from the handset side.

Flexible displays are rollable and bendable to adopt various curved appearances. They can even survive impacts from a hammer! How about your smartphone folding into a wrist watch?

International Business Times recently claimed Samsung was working on a Galaxy smartphone with a flexible AMOLED display, dubbed the Galaxy Skin. The AMOLED display uses plastic polyimide substrate instead of glass, which in itself allows for high flexibility. Microsoft, too, is betting on flexible displays in its vision of the post-PC future. Samsung Mobile Display showed off at CES 2011 a prototype of a 4.5-inch flexible AMOLED Display with electro activity polymer, seen below. Another clip right after the break.